Crowd imagines ambitious transformation for Bloomfield Centre

Karen Filbee-Dexter uses wheat paste to stick her artwork on the outside wall of the Bloomfield Centre during the In Full Bloom Community Festival on Sunday. Housing Nova Scotia also kicked off a community consultation session inside the centre on Sunday. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

Brenda Woolner wrote some of her hopes down Sunday afternoon and stuck them on the wall of a building that will soon be torn down.

A social worker from Dartmouth, she used to live in north-end Halifax and wanted to share her concerns about the redevelopment of the former Bloomfield school site.

The people behind a massive project that will cost $100 million and see hundreds of residential units and 30,000 square feet of community and cultural space built between Robie and Agricola streets, had asked the public to say what they want the project to look like.

Like many other attendees, Woolner wrote her opinion on a sticky note and placed it near several posters seeking comment on topics such as the new development’s height, environmental design, parking and appearance.

“All we can do is take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to us,” she said.

“I just think that this is a very innovative option for this community. I think it has the capacity and the potential to be a beacon for other community developments. I’m very happy that Nova Scotia Housing is the developer and it’s not gone to a private, for-profit kind of development.”

Woolner’s ideas, and those of all the others, were to be compiled and then presented to the architects at Lydon Lynch.

“Bloomfield can be transformative,” Eugene Pieczonka of Lydon Lynch said during his short presentation Sunday.

He said two buildings at the site will be saved and adapted in the project. The Common and Fielding buildings, on the south side of the property, are structurally sound and will not be torn down.

In addition, Pieczonka said the project has to include 478 residential unit (with 40 per cent of them being affordable housing), 30,000 square feet of community and cultural space, its own parking and street-level retail.

“Where has this ever happened in this city before?” he said. “Let’s not allow us to settle.”

About 80 people made their way into the consultation session and hundreds attended the In Full Bloom festival outside, according to Susanna Fuller of Imagine Bloomfield, which has been working to see the building redeveloped for years.

She said organizers wanted to have the outdoor festival, which included music, food, games and several booths, at the same time as the consultation.

“It just exemplifies who this community is. The outside (event) is supposed to show what is really going on inside … a whole bunch of things and people meeting and being a community.”

Community Services Minister Joanne Bernard was at Sunday’s gathering and praised the people of Imagine Bloomfield for engaging the community and government on the project.

“This project really is going to lay the foundation for what social housing and affordable housing … is going to look like for generations to come. So it has to be done right,” she said in an interview.